BOCA COLORADO, Peru (AP) — Below an umbrella of trees deep in the Peruvian Amazon, drunken miners carry on their shoulders the casket of a man whose search for gold ended with a bullet in his stomach.

"In my heart there is no peace," the Rev. Pablo Zabala sings as the coffin is lowered into the dirt in a cemetery where the graves of about 50 other illegal miners are marked with plain black crosses.

The 70-year-old Spanish priest tends to some of the rainforest's most hapless souls. Men from poor villages who search mercury-laced rivers for a pebble of gold. Women who sell their bodies in the b...